All in a day's work: Courtenay the Student

21/1/2013

Courtenay the 17-year-old student

During the holidays, before she starts her last year of secondary school, Courtenay is working at a fashion retail store.

8:30am Three pieces of white toast with peanut butter, eaten on the bus on the way to the mall; I am running late.9:30am Just before the store opens I have a small chocolate milk drink because I forgot to have a drink when I woke up.12pm Really starving. Have a Subway chicken fillet sub a Coke Zero and a cookie.3.00pm My friends call in to the store and give me two banana cupcakes with chocolate icing that they made this morning. I eat them both!9.00pm My family have barbecue steak, sausages and salad for dinner but I get home quite late and they have already eaten. Mum leaves me a plate with a bit of everything on it but I only eat one sausage with lots of tomato sauce in a piece of bread. She won’t know I didn’t eat any salad!

Nadia Lim’s nutrition quick fix

At 17, you’re still growing and developing, so it’s essential you have optimal nutrition and create good eating habits early on. Iron and calcium are the most common nutrient deficiencies in teenage girls. Calcium helps achieve peak bone mass (the maximum bone density you will ever achieve) up until our early 20s; after then it starts to decline. So it’s particularly important in younger years. Up your daily intake to two servings of low-fat dairy. And you are much better-off having the steak instead of the sausage as it will contain more than double the iron. Vitamin C, from fresh fruit and veg, boosts iron absorption too and you’re having hardly any. Use these to replace all those refined carbohydrates (sugar, white flour, white bread) that have very few useful nutrients in them.

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